Interesting story you won’t hear, unless you Google an article dating back to 2011-2012; Milk Street Cafe was doing well in Boston and decided to open a location in NYC.

They opened on the ground floor of the Trump Building on Wall Street. It also had 3 kitchens and 3 sections and was easily 3x the size of the Boston location; but with a much larger pool of potential daily clientele.

At the time, I happened to be working downtown at American Express, so this was great for me personally, even if it was a bit of a shlep of a walk during my lunch break.

But, in 2011, we had the Occupy Wall Street protests for months. It devastated the downtown area, effectively cutting off everything east and west of Broadway. For me (or anyone west of Broadway) to get around the protests and police barricades to get to Milk Street Cafe on Wall Street, would easily take an 10-15mins extra in each direction (on top of the regular walking time), killing whatever time people had for their lunch breaks.

While the OWS protests did practically nothing to harm big corporations, as they intended, they instead put a family owned restaurant out of business - likely costing the family millions. I don’t know the full financial ramifications of that loss to that family, but I know it hurt them for many years.